Visible City (25 page)

From afar, he tried to pick Nina out among the swarms of mothers. In the past two weeks, he and Nina had exchanged a few e-mails, but she hadn’t called him, a silence he wasn’t sure how to read. He had become so accustomed to her regular presence in his day that he checked his phone messages and e-mails with great urgency. He stared at his phone, as though expecting it to change form, become her. He looked out the window in the hope that some coded message might flicker.

He knew all too well the part of himself that would feel relief at her retreat. Less required of him, less expected. A brief flash of excitement, but overall, a complication averted, his quiet life unimpeded. He would go forward, impassively, into whatever the rest of his life happened to hold. Nina would be a memory of something that had happened long ago. He walked through Riverside Park, from playground to playground, in search of her. All around him, children screamed, in the avid throes of life. When he looked up, above the rocky outcropping of the park, he saw the rising spires of steel. Last week, as he and Claudia happened to walk out of the building at the same time, Claudia had marveled that cranes dangled lethal beams, yet they all went about their lives oblivious to what was above them. At the time he had been only half listening and had murmured his disinterested assent, but now he stopped to think. What if they did look up, what if they really saw what was around them? He stopped walking, newly aware of an idea that had started to take shape.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Wendy said to Nina and her children, who were assembled around the table, awaiting instructions. Wendy passed out small tubes of icing, bowls of sprinkles and sparkles, and Nina looked on as she displayed pictures of cookies that were perfect replicas of clowns and cats, houses and dogs, the icing as smooth as a potter’s glaze.

Since she and the kids had been sick, Nina had been hiding from Wendy. She left nursery school pickup early. She took the kids to distant parks where they knew no one. They stayed home and ate Wacky Mac in front of the TV. Except for the few hours when Max was in school, she was alone with both kids all day. Emma had called to say that she still wasn’t feeling well, and Nina had felt hurt at her excuses, having allowed herself to think that they were friends. She told herself that the closeness had been in her own mind; Emma had probably lost interest, her kids one more thing to take hold of, then let go. But the possibility that it was something more complicated pressed at her.
Don’t think about that,
Nina told herself. Don’t wonder what Emma knows, don’t try to imagine the betrayal she would feel if she did know. Think of nothing but the kids, nothing but the demands of the day. She didn’t call Leon, making every effort to stay inside the narrow fold she had constructed for herself. If she busied herself with the children, she wouldn’t have time to think—this, the path of escape so many of them had chosen.

“I ruined mine,” Sophie said, her tears spilling onto her dog-shaped cookie which looked nothing like the one in the picture.

Wendy surveyed what her daughter had made. Both the icing and the children were more willful than anticipated. The cookies were becoming increasingly unrecognizable. The cookie cutters seemed incapable of doing their job.

“Come on, honey, don’t give up! You can do it! Try again,” Wendy urged her, and glanced over at Harry, who seemed unbothered by the mess he’d made. She smiled at Nina. “They usually love baking with me. I don’t know what’s gotten into them today.”

Max crawled on the floor, pretending to be a dog. After his encounter in the park, which he’d told her about though Emma had neglected to mention it, his love of firemen had been transformed into a love of dogs.

“Max, don’t you want to make cookies?” Wendy asked.

As Lily licked the crystals off Max’s hands until her face sparkled blue and green, Wendy’s expression became more grim.

“I hope he Purelled,” Wendy said.

“Actually we forgot,” Nina said. Let Wendy accuse her of squalor. Let her cast a downward sweeping eye. Absent the rules and all the expectations, it no longer felt as hard to be with the kids.

Wendy made a face, but there wasn’t time to linger on this trespass when there were greater ones happening all around. “Come on, Harry, not like that. I know you can do it like I taught you. A little more icing, Sophie,” Wendy said, her voice rising in pitch. “Do it like this. Try it again. Good. Once more.”

Sophie threw the dough onto the floor and stared her mother down. She swept out her arms, knocking the bowls of edible glitter onto the floor. “You always make me do it your way,” she screamed.

“I see how angry you must be feeling but edible glitter is not for throwing,” Wendy said. Her smile looked like it could rip open at any minute and become a scowl. “Do you want to draw your feelings? Do you want your alone time? Do you want me to get your special chair?”

“Can you please please please stop talking!” Sophie screamed, her face bright red, her hands pressed against her ears. Looking her mother in the eye, she overturned two more bowls of glitter, her hands and the floor now dusted with sparkles. A bowl of hot-pink glitter landed on Harry’s head.

Nina sat still, enjoying the sight of other children’s meltdowns. She tried to squelch the rise of laughter, but she couldn’t help herself. She laughed until her shoulders shook and tears sprang to her eyes.

“What’s so funny?” Wendy asked.

“Nothing,” Nina tried to say, but that made her laugh more.

Wendy tried to grab her kids, but Sophie, Harry, and Max were jumping in a pack, a tangle of arms and legs. They tossed glitter in the air, licked it from their hands, from the floor.

There was a tussle, then a scream. Nina stopped laughing and Wendy froze, both of them anticipating everything from a snatched toy to a severed limb.

Max’s arm was imprinted with a bracelet of tiny teeth. Nina stood to console him, as Wendy leaped toward Harry and grabbed him by the arm.

“What is wrong with you! Why are you biting? How many times do I have to tell you?” Wendy screamed.

“It’s okay,” Nina said as she hugged Max. “I think he’s fine.”

“How can you say that? We both know it’s not fine.” She took hold of Harry by the shoulders and shook him. “People are not for biting. How would you like it if someone bit you? We only bite food, okay, okay,
OKAY
? Apologize to Max right now,” Wendy insisted as she held him in front of Max.

The words were right, but her face was distorted by rage, her eyes bulging, her mouth twisted into a grimace. She turned on Sophie as well. “What did I ever do to deserve this? Do you not see how hard I work for you? Do you not realize that I’ve given up everything for you?”

Instead of apologizing, Sophie began shoving handfuls of sprinkles into her mouth, trying to clean up the mess as quickly as she could. Still in his mother’s arms, Harry shoved his hand toward his mother’s mouth, offering himself up to be kissed. For a moment, neither of them moved. Wendy was silent, her color drained. Even when she put her arm around Sophie and dutifully kissed Harry’s hand, it was too late. The embers of hot, red rage had flared and Nina had seen it all.

The spare key to her father’s car was in the kitchen drawer, and Emma borrowed it without permission. Her whole life had been transported in this car, from camp and then home, from college and then home, and to her apartment with Steven. Now she needed to borrow it once again, though this was a move she was going to do on her own.

She had found an apartment on Craigslist, a share with four other people in what was once a two-bedroom subdivided by portable walls. It amazed her that basically you could get your whole life from Craigslist. She’d also found a job in a nursery school, working as an assistant in the toddler room. When she went for an interview, the two-year-olds were awash in finger paints, slapping colorful hands onto their papers. Emma had crouched down next to two girls who were leaving their gooey marks on each other’s arms. Maybe when she was their teacher she would have to put a stop to their behavior, but in that moment, all she had done was join in their laughter.

She’d told neither of her parents what she’d decided, because somewhere along the way, she had shed her belief that they knew best what she should do. If she told them, they would pretend to be accepting, then try to reframe her decision into something more comprehensible: she really wanted to develop curriculum in children’s foreign language instruction or eventually get a degree in child development. Maybe one day, but for now, she wanted to live not away from the noise and the mess but as deeply inside it as she could. She would be changing diapers, wiping noses, life broken down into the tiniest moments.

Emma parked the car in front of the apartment she’d shared with Steven. She ran up the flights of stairs and went inside, afraid that if she paused, she would back down. She was scared of what she was about to do, but as she stopped to catch her breath, she realized that it was a new kind of fear. Rather than holding her back, it pushed her forward, inevitable, exhilarating. She wanted to see her life through her own eyes. If she was wrong about this choice, she would have no one to blame but herself.

It was the middle of the day but Steven was asleep on the couch and stirred as she came in, the pattern of their couch pillows imprinted on his cheek.

“What are you doing?” he mumbled.

“Go back to sleep,” Emma whispered, hoping he’d awake hours from now and think he’d been robbed.

“I didn’t know you were here,” he said plaintively, expecting her to come sit beside him and offer consolation.

“I’m a figment of your imagination,” she said, and began filling every stray knapsack and shopping bag she could find, the kind of leave-taking most people did only when they were being chased. Most of the clothes she stuffed into her bags either no longer fit or she no longer liked, but she didn’t want to leave anything behind. The bags were so heavy that she struggled to lift them, but that was a good thing. Once she moved out, it would be too much work to return.

Emma made a few trips to the car, refusing to slow down. She was glad that she had somewhere she needed to be. After a few weeks of pretending to be sick, she’d called Nina and offered to baby-sit that afternoon, having missed Nina and the kids more than she’d anticipated.

Emma had stayed away out of anger, stayed away because she didn’t know how to understand what she had seen in the park. Having continuously reconstructed the image of her father and Nina, she could play it back from every angle, supplying alternative endings, like the “choose your own adventure” books she’d once loved because you could always backtrack and start again. At home, she searched her father’s face for signs of guilt, but he betrayed nothing. Even if she confronted him with what she’d seen, he would claim that he and Nina had simply run into each other and taken a walk, making Emma think she had misread what at the time had seemed so clear. She knew him so little that he could get away with almost anything. But it didn’t matter, she realized, because this problem wasn’t hers to fix. No one, not her parents or anyone whom she’d envied, had lives as orderly as they made it appear; she might have run wildly, uncontrollably, until she twisted her ankle and fell, but how many of those who gaped at her from the seeming safety of their own lives had wished to join in?

“Wait,” Steven said, as Emma dragged a final bag across the room.

She expected another fight, but he shocked her by bursting into tears. He was barely recognizable in this rumpled pose of love. She understood now the problem with this game of chase, or hide-and-seek, or whatever it was she and Steven always played. Once you were found, you had to be the one to go looking, shouting in vain to
come out, come out wherever you are.
She’d rather take her chances: stand alone behind the curtains or under the bed and endure the terrifying thrill of having chosen the best hiding spot of all.

Standing in front of him, she had no way to comfort him. She needed to do this, yet she knew that it wasn’t true that you could always run—or if you did, you couldn’t get away unscathed; there would be casualties left in your wake. He was waiting for her to offer some fuller explanation, and she forced herself to take in his look of betrayal. What could she say when she could hardly explain to herself the feeling that she had arrived suddenly at a wall and she could not move forward, could not continue. “I’m so sorry but I can’t”—this was the only thing she could offer for upending the future they had planned.